Tango Wellness Motivator Review

The Tango Wellness Motivator is a fitness wearable made by a Finland-based company called Health Care Success Ltd. It’s an activity and sleep tracker that you can wear on your wrist. Priced at Rs. 4,490 and available via Amazon India, the Tango Wellness Motivator faces some serious competition in the country. Both Xiaomi and Fitbit sell fitness wearables for less than Rs. 5,000, which automatically puts pressure on any new brand that tries to enter the market. Is the Tango Wellness Motivator good enough to hold its own against established competitors? We used the wearable for two weeks to find out.

Tango Wellness Motivator design
The Tango Wellness Motivator is sleek, light, and comfortable to wear. These are great attributes for any fitness wearable to have, and we were surprised to find that a wearable made by a relatively new brand managed this so well. We wore the device on multiple hot summer days and didn’t find it uncomfortable at any point.

The only problem with the band’s design is its locking mechanism. It just isn’t secure enough for all-day use. On one occasion, the Tango Wellness Motivator fell off our wrist when we were just reaching for a backpack. Whenever we were wearing it in a train on a bus, we were worried about accidental tugs pulling it off our wrist.

The screen and the band are integrated in this wearable, which means that you don’t have to pop out a capsule to charge it. The downside, however, is a clunky clip-on charger. We found it hard to attach the charger to the Tango Wellness Motivator, but thankfully, the device didn’t dislodge itself once we managed to start charging it.

The display is one of the best we’ve seen on fitness wearables at this price. The Tango Wellness Motivator uses a large, bold, and easily legible font. The text is white on a black background, making it very easy to see what’s on screen. We just wish there was a way to display text vertically instead of the default horizontal orientation. When you wear the tracker, it becomes hard to position your wrist in a way that lets you read what’s being shown. There’s just the one button on this tracker and while it’s a little hard to press, it lets you cycle through your activity and sleep stats.

Tango Wellness Motivator performance and battery life
From an activity tracking standpoint, the Tango Wellness Motivator is satisfactory. We noticed a deviation of around five to seven percent against the step tracker on an iPhone, given an average of 4,000 steps per day. Even with sleep tracking, we found the device’s measurements to be fairly accurate. Do note that sleep tracking is manual so it will only work if you remember to activate sleep mode before going to bed and turn it off when you wake up.

The manual that ships with the Tango Wellness Motivator asks people to download an app called ACT2FIT to sync data. Interestingly, when we tried searching for “Tango Fitness” in the App Store, we found an app called Tango Go that syncs data with the tracker. It turns out that the tracker syncs with both ACT2FIT and Tango Go apps.
We just wish that we could say anything positive about them. Both are equally badly designed and show all of your previous activity data in plain numbers, without any graphs or charts. There’s no way to check sleep data for previous days in the app, so all you get to see is how well your most recent nap was. We also found a bug which prevented the app from showing our activity history if we didn’t sync it with the band for two or three days. Another sync fixed this bug, but it’s quite inconvenient to perform a sync every time you want to have a look at your activity history.

The battery life of the Tango Wellness Motivator is quite good – we only had to charge it once in two weeks. That’s a relief, because the charger is not the most user friendly.

Verdict
The Tango Wellness Motivator is great as a basic activity tracker as long as you can live with a sub-par companion app and manual sleep tracking. However when you look at the competition, it’s evident that this product doesn’t offer great value for money. The Xiaomi Mi Band 2 can track sleep automatically and also has a passive heart rate sensor. Considering that it sells for just Rs. 2,000, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to pay more than twice as much for the Tango Wellness Motivator.